Sending HTML Email via PHP with Variables and External HTML Template

Question

I'm trying to send an email through PHP. Originally my $message variable was set to html as well as PHP variables from user input. This works fine--I'm receiving the emails with the correct variables and all.

Then I tried to include some logic which checks to see which service was selected by the user from the form they filled out, and based on that, the contents of the $message variable were changed (i.e. the outputting html content was slightly different).

In order not to have a long file with bunch of html, I decided to move the html code to separate files and set the $message variable = to file_get_contents() . The email sends fine, but my variables are no longer displaying the user input data. I even tried using session_start() at the top of the file where the html template is.

<?php
session_start();

$_SESSION["service"] = $_POST['service'];

if (isset($_POST['submit'])){
  $service = $_POST['service'];
  
  if($_POST['service']=="Service 1"){$message = 'email_template-service-1.php';}
    else $message = file_get_contents("email_template-service-2.php");

    $to = '[email protected]';
    $subject = 'Subject';
    $headers = 'From: [email protected]' . "\r\n" .
    'Reply-To: [email protected]' . "\r\n" .

    mail($to, $subject, $message, $headers);
    header('Location: /confirmation.php');
}

else {header('Location: /index.php');}
?>

Am I missing something here? TIA!

Where is the user input data sent? $_POST or $_GET? email_template.php is that just a static template? Show us your complete code, what you have isn't enough to answer your question. If you echo $message what do you get? — DCR
– DCR, Commented Feb 27, 2019 at 22:07

Daniel G · Accepted Answer · 2019-02-27 22:31:35Z

1

A better approach would be to just include the file and use ob_get_clean():

ob_start();
if($_POST['service']=="Service 1") {include 'email_template-service-1.php';}
else include 'email_template-service-2.php';
$message = ob_get_clean();

Anything echoed between ob_start() and $message = ob_get_clean() will go into the $message variable.

answered Feb 27, 2019 at 22:31

Daniel G

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